I find the experience of CARL ANDRE’s sculpture difficult to describe but hardly empty. It is not just the spareness of the work that accounts for this I think, but a combination of things; the way the formal rationale of the work seems to be leading down a path toward something like pointing rather than speaking, the way the impersonality of the sculpture seems to be transferred to oneself. And when one tries to work out a way of placing Andre’s work so that it does assume the significance, “art,” one feels that the work is closely tied to the power of speech. In the best experience of the work, one gets the sense of being presented with something for the first time, a feeling that I associate with learning the name of something—the thing is somehow there in a new way. In short I think Andre’s best work is about presence to the world as presence to oneself, or about the situation of the